Once during a weekly staff meeting at hospice, we were asked what we must let go of when facing death. Mary, one of the other therapists answered, “Well, for starters, we have to drop our idea of who we are.” I don’t know what the other therapists thought of what she said, but her answer resonated with me. I had been attending courses at an ashram in India on my vacations from work, and this was exactly what we were being taught there. We were learning to let go of our limited idea of who we are. Although the courses weren’t about facing physical death, they were about dropping our pre-conceived ideas of who we were and what it meant to become “enlightened.” For me and many other spiritual seekers who came to the ashram, especially the Westerners, the experience there was not at all what we had anticipated. We had expected to get somewhere, to become someone other than who we were. Instead of “gaining” enlightenment, we had to release our misguided notions of ourselves and what we thought we were searching for.
“First of all, there is no person to become enlightened,” they told us. “Personalities are constantly arising and receding, so which one is going to become enlightened?” There is no individual or personal enlightenment. Becoming awakened isn’t something we can check off our to-do list. In fact, they pointed out, it is impossible to become something we already are. Just like facing death, the spiritual path is a process of letting go of limited concepts and beliefs about who we think we are so that we can be who we truly are. Mary’s answer at the staff meeting contained a profound truth.
Throughout the years working at hospice, I made several pilgrimages to India—a culture that has sought for thousands of years to crack the code of human existence. I was first drawn to Indian spirituality in the sixties at fifteen, after reading Gandhi’s autobiography and taking a yoga class at a neighbor’s house down the street, long before yoga became part of mainstream culture in the West. It was decades, though, before India finally opened her doors to me. The experiences there, visiting sacred sites and studying with spiritual teachers, brought about both subtle and profound changes that opened up new dimensions of my life and helped make sense of the years working at hospice, immersed in death.
Our life, just as it is, is our path to awakening. It’s important for those of us on a spiritual journey to recognize that, while we can learn from others’ experiences and knowledge along the way, we are each traveling our own unique path to greater wholeness, freedom, and contentment. Our lives are specifically designed for our awakening. As one of our teachers explained, there are as many forms of enlightenment as there are individuals on Earth. It is so important that we allow others to be where they are on their own inner journey, and it is just as important to allow ourselves to be where we are in our own development.
When I first met Stu, one of my spiritual mentors, I had been on the spiritual path for many years and thought I should be farther along in the process. He explained that the mind cannot judge our own or another person’s spiritual development because spiritual growth occurs on a level the mind has no access to. A common misconception about the spiritual path is the idea that because some popular spiritual teachers in the West seem to have experienced spontaneous awakenings, we should expect the same. Our teachers explained this is not necessarily the norm. They told us that most of us will experience a more gradual awakening. In India it is recognized that enlightenment requires multiple lifetimes. Just like in the material world, there are no shortcuts, no quick fixes in terms of spiritual development. And if we haven’t done the work, we don’t even know what is involved. It is easy to mistakenly believe we can magically skip over the effort needed to attain the level of consciousness of a master. Traveling our own unique path is the only way we can know what is required of us.
To evolve spiritually does require something of us. And, at the same time, paradoxically, we are right where we need to be right now. The mind tries to convince us otherwise. It cooks up any number of stories about why we’re not OK where we are, why we need to be somewhere else. Striving toward some end product, such as enlightenment or awakening (which is actually just a concept in the mind) only creates a sense of unrest and disappointment that we haven’t arrived yet. As the masters remind us, no matter what the mind tells us, we are always nothing more or less than the totality, nothing more or less than perfectly ourselves. One thing that is required on the path is learning to embrace paradox and uncertainty.
Can we release our concepts of how our lives should be and simply live what is? And can we recognize that although the knowledge of our own mortality follows us throughout our lives, we don’t need to be facing our immanent death to, as Mary said in that staff meeting, “drop our idea of who we are.”
Consider This: There is nowhere else to be other than where you are right now on your sacred life journey.
